Hendrik Buschmeier
I am a tenure-track assistant professor (Juniorprofessor) of Digital Linguistics at the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Bielefeld University, heading the Digital Linguistics Lab.
I received a PhD in Computer Science from the Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University and have worked in the CITEC research group Social Cognitive Systems Group (Stefan Kopp). I have been involved in the research projects KOMPASS (BMBF-funded), ‘Rhythm and Timing in Dialogue’ (DFG-funded), and ‘Dialogue Coordination for Sociable Agents’ (CITEC-internal funding).Research Interests
My general area of interest is computational modelling of the representations, processes, and behaviours underlying the human capability for interacting in dialogue. In particular, I am interested in the issue of how a joint understanding can be achieved among autonomous conversational agents (human or artificial), including questions such as: How can an agent know whether and how its utterances are understood by its interaction partner? How can it know what the reasons for problems in understanding are? How can an agent design and adapt its utterances and behaviours so that mis-understandings are repaired and future ones avoided? How do agents coordinate their behaviour, cooperate to achieve joint goals, and collaborate on the construction of a joint understanding? Finally, I am interested in how a joint understanding can be achieved in an effective yet efficient way, such that a model is plausible from a cognitive and linguistic point of view, and practical from a computational point of view.
Projects
- TRR 318 Constructing Explainablity, Project A02: Monitoring the Understanding of Explanations
- CRC 1646 Linguistic Creativity in Communication, Project B02: Computational Linguistic Creativity in Reference Games Between Interactive Dialogue Agents 🎓 Open PhD position
- CRC 1646 Linguistic Creativity in Communication, Project INF: User-Oriented Research Infrastructure Assisting Linguistic Data Collection and (Re-)Use
- it's OWL Hybrid Living: Human-Robot Collaboration in the Kitchen of the Future”
Selected Publications
See the complete list of publications organised by topic, by date, or on Google scholar.
Buschmeier, H., & Kopp, S. (2018). Communicative listener feedback in human–agent interaction: artificial speakers need to be attentive and adaptive. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, pp. 1213–1221, Stockholm, Sweden. [pdf/preprint, bib, material, poster] *Best Paper Award Socially Interactive Agents Track*
Buschmeier, H. (2018). Attentive Speaking. From Listener Feedback to Interactive Adaptation. PhD-thesis, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany. [PDF, bib]
Buschmeier, H., & Kopp, S. (2014). A dynamic minimal model of the listener for feedback-based dialogue coordination. In SemDial 2014: Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, pp. 17–25, Edinburgh, UK. [pdf, bib, model]
Buschmeier, H. & Kopp, S. (2013). Co-constructing grounded symbols—Feedback and incremental adaptation in human–agent dialogue. Künstliche Intelligenz, 27:137–143. [pdf/preprint, bib]
Buschmeier, H., Baumann, T., Dosch, B., Kopp, S., & Schlangen, D. (2012). Combining incremental language generation and incremental speech synthesis for adaptive information presentation. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pp. 295–303, Seoul, South Korea. [pdf, bib, video]
Buschmeier, H., Malisz, Z., Włodarczak, M., Kopp, S., & Wagner, P. (2011). ‘Are you sure you’re paying attention?’ – ‘Uh-huh’. Communicating understanding as a marker of attentiveness. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2011, pp. 2057–2060, Florence, Italy. [pdf/preprint, bib]
Buschmeier, H., Bergmann, K., & Kopp, S. (2009). An alignment-capable microplanner for natural language generation. In Proceedings of the 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pp. 82–89, Athens, Greece. [pdf, bib]
Software
- TextGridTools – Read, write, and manipulate Praat TextGrid files with Python (with Marcin Włodarczak)
- IPAACA – Incremental Processing Architecture for Artificial Conversational Agents (with Ramin Yaghoubzadeh)
- PRIMO – Probabilistic Inference Modules (with Jan Pöppel)
Teaching
Current and Recent Courses
- From Speech Act Theory to Dialogue Act Modelling (Seminar)
(Winter 2024; with Maryam Mohammadi) - Informationsstrukturierung (Lecture and Lab-Session)
(Winter 2024) - Statistische Grundlagen der Computerlinguistik (Seminar + Übung)
(Summer 2024) - Informationsstrukturierung 2 (Seminar)
(Summer 2024)
See the complete list of courses.
Current and Recent Activities
- Workshop on “Multimodal Co-Construction of Explanations with XAI”(at ICMI 2024, Nov 4, 2024, Costa Rica).
- Co-Editor of a Special Issue “Embodied Conversational Systems for Human-Robot Interaction” of Dialogue & Discourse (with Dimitra Gkatzia, Carl Strathearn, Mary-Ellen Foster).
- Co-Editor of a Special Issue “Conversation Analysis and Conversational Technologies” of Discourse and Communication (with Saul Albert, Elizabeth Stokoe, Wyke Stommel). A special issue ‘Lauch Event’ takes place (virtually) on November 29, 2024, 14–18 CET, register here.
- Co-Organiser of a panel on “Robust and flexible interactive language technology for human empowerment” (at IPrA 2023, Jul 9–14, 2023, Brussels, Belgium).
- Co-Editor of the Special Issue on “ Computational Dialogue Modelling: The Role of Pragmatics and Common Ground in Interaction” of the Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics (IJCoL), 7:1–2, 2021.
- Workshop on “Creativity in Language and Communication”, Feb 18–19, 2021, Bielefeld, Germany.
- 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation for Human–Robot Interaction (at
HRI 2020INLG 2020, Dec 15–18, 2020, virtual meeting). - Co-Editor of the Special Issue on “Socially Intelligent Agents” of the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces (JMUI), 15:2, 2021.
- 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, Jul 2–5, 2019, Paris, France. The proceedings are now available in the ACM Digital Library.
- Workshop on Natural Language Generation for Human–Robot Interaction (at INLG 2018, Nov 8, 2018, Tilburg, The Netherlands). The proceedings are now available in the ACL-Anthology.
Contact
Email: hbuschme@uni-bielefeld.de
Mastodon: @hbuschme@mastodon.social
Phone: +49 521 106-12171
Mail: PO-Box 10 01 31, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany
Office: UHG-C5-201
Office hours: Wednesdays 14–16, Zoom-Meeting
My public PGP key:
6299 7D58 9F34 DBE8 3BA2 918E F282 86FE 624C BCD5